Lily Allen: Album, tour driven by myspace buzz

Lily Allen is a 21-year-old London smart aleck with a hit album, a U.S. tour in the offing and more street buzz than Paris Hilton could buy in a decade.

And she has done it all without significant support from commercial radio, MTV or anything else associated with the 20th Century music business.

Instead, shortly after signing a record deal in the U.K. last year, Allen went straight to her fans by streaming her music on myspace.com, the social networking site with more than 100 million members. She posted personal photos, chattily described her boozy escapades and released videos that established her as a breezy reggae-pop singer with a razor wit. The four songs she posted on the site have been streamed more than 2 million times; one of them, "Smile," was a No. 1 hit in England last summer after radio stations caught up with it. Her U.K. debut album, "Alright, Still," subsequently sold more than 300,000 copies -- a platinum album overseas.

Now she's poised to invade North America, first with a brief club tour that will bring her to the Double Door Oct. 16, then with the release of "Alright, Still" in January.

Sell out in a hurry

"This is completely a myspace buzz-driven thing," says Dave Rockland, a talent buyer at Jam Productions who booked the 550-capacity Double Door show. "Her show is going to sell out easily with no radio and no major-label release. We're going to see more and more of this as people shift away from radio and go to the Internet [to find out about new music], because that's where the hype is being generated for these kinds of artists."

To hear Allen tell it, she barely paid attention to the Internet before she became the latest unofficial poster girl for Internet music.

"I wasn't one of those people looking around for music all the time online," she says in a phone interview from London. "But I saw that everybody else was doing it, and I just thought I'd follow suit. It wasn't about getting paid or anything. It was about a social scene, and a way for me to get my music out. I didn't think it was going to turn into this ... craziness."

Allen's songs cut through the Internet traffic with their engaging, deceptively sunny Caribbean-flavored melodies, and her clever putdowns of the unfortunate boys who done her wrong and the hapless ones who tried to pick her up. She's just a modern girl who has learned that sounding like you're enjoying crumpets and tea while dishing on your ex is the best revenge.

It was a career she fell into almost by accident. Her father was a small-time actor, her mother an aspiring movie producer, and their divorce led to some lean years early in life for Allen. She drifted in and out of more than a dozen schools while taking piano and guitar lessons and studying singing. But she didn't consider writing songs until her first manager suggested it.

"He said I wasn't going to make any money if I didn't write," Allen says. "And I didn't want to be like Britney Spears. She may be rich, but I didn't want to compromise myself as a human being. I wanted to have control of my music and how I presented it."

She was hand's on with her high-profile producers (Greg Kurstin, Mark Ronson, Futurecut) as her album took shape. "I have to be in the studio while everything is being created," she says. "We'll listen to records and we'll sample the parts I like, slow them down, speed them up, add some beats or other instruments, and then I would stand at the microphone and freestyle the melody and improvise lyrics, stream of consciousness."

Instant response

When she threw up the songs on her myspace page, she got instant validation. "I started getting huge amounts of messages and fan requests, and at first I didn't realize it was anything special," she says. "I just assumed the same thing was happening for everyone else."

Sharon Lord, senior vice president of marketing at Capitol Records, which will release Allen's music in the U.S., says the word-of-mouth frenzy led the record industry to the artist. "Everybody wants to be in the Lily game," she says. "She's not playing by the [old] rules. It's easy one-stop shopping at myspace, and Lily is great online because she's always on her blog. The fans can sense they're dealing with somebody real. We need more of that in the music business."

And to hear Lord and other industry insiders tell it, Allen's myspace breakout won't be the last such Internet-driven success story as the industry transitions into a digital world.

"A few years ago, something like this couldn't have happened," Jam's Rockland says. "But the generation that Lily Allen is speaking to is who we're trying to sell concert tickets to. It's a perfect delivery system for music: You click on a page and a song starts playing. More and more with these kinds of artists, the hype is being generated online. Radio and MTV aren't driving the business the way they used to."